History
In the late 1990s IETF began working on a solution to the problem of shared IPs. In 1997, Cisco informed them that this was already covered by Cisco patents. In 1998, Cisco told them it was covered by their patent of HSRP (Hot Standby Router Protocol). Nonetheless, IETF continued work on VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol). After some debate, people decided it was OK to allow patented material in a standard, as long as it was available under RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) Licensing terms. Because VRRP fixed problems with the HSRP protocol, Cisco began using VRRP instead, while still claiming it as its own.
Cisco informed the OpenBSD developers they would enforce their patent of HSRP. This may have been related to their lawsuit with Alcatel. Thus, a free implementation of VRRP could not be made. OpenBSD developers started CARP as an alternative to the patented VRRP, as the "reasonable and non-discriminatory" licensing terms necessarily excluded open-source implementations. To avoid infringing the HSRP patent, they ensured their idea for CARP was fundamentally different. Because of OpenBSD's focus on security, CARP was designed with security in mind, and is designed to use cryptography. It became available, completely for free, in October 2003. It was integrated into FreeBSD and released initially with FreeBSD 5.4 in May 2005. It has since been integrated into NetBSD.
Read more about this topic: Common Address Redundancy Protocol
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